Storage - Page 136

Fujitsu have just leveled up with Hitachi in terms of the world's largest 2.5" hard drive to hit the market. The new series of MHZ2 BT 2.5" hard disk drives come in a capacity of up to 500GB. Unfortunately as is the case with Hitachi's recently announced 500GB 2.5" drive, this one also appears to rely on three platters which makes its physical height a few mm higher than standard 2.5" drives; thus making it impossible to fit into some notebook chassis'.

The drives specs include a 4,200RPM spindle speed, 8MB buffer, 300MB/s Serial ATA interface, 12ms read seek time, 21dB noise out and a power consumption of 0.5W at idle/1.8W when reading or writing.

Fujitsu have said that they plan to roll out the MHZ2 BT series of drives into the market at the end of May.

For further details, head over to Fujitsu's website.

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has today announced its new "Power Over eSATA" initiative. This new specification provides a solid steady form of power to eSATA devices without the need for a seperate power cord to the system which has been required by the majority of standard eSATA devices to date.

If only they could have done it right the first time and made this a standard to begin with; but as they say, better late than never.

Hitachi have pushed the barrier of mechanical notebook storage today with the introduction of the world's first 500GB 2.5" HDD, this raising the capacity limit by a whopping 180GB over previous drives.

Dubbed the Travelstar 5K500, this HDD operates at 5400RPM with a seek time of 12ms. Hitachi were able to squeeze 500GB into the drive by using three platters with a 260Gb/in² areal density.

There is a downside however; the drive's thickness has been increased from the standard 9.5mm to 12.5mm to fit all three platters inside the casing, this making the unit too large to fit inside the majority of notebooks currently on the market, not to mention external enclosures too.

As a result of the above, Hitachi are aiming the drive more so at PC makers who may choose to make more space available for it in next-gen systems. On that note, ASUS were quick to respond in announcing that they plan to design the world's first One Terabyte Notebook by allowing for enough space inside to carry two of these new Hitachi drives. You can read the full PR about this here.

The official announcement on the new 500GB TravelStar can be found here folks.

Thecus has launched a new home product with the N3200 NAS with RAID 5 support. This is the first product in the 3x00-series from Thecus and it's Thecus first high-end model for home users. It can house up to three hard drives and you'll need three drives to take advantage of the RAID 5 capabilities. The N3200 measures 160 x 170 x 215mm (WxHxD) and it has a completely tool less design. You can fit up to 3TB of storage in it and the hard drives are easily installed and removed.

The N3200 also has a front mounted LCD display that show status information and allows for some system management operations. It also has USB ports and the N3200 can be given a wireless upgrade this way via a USB dongle. Oddly enough the press release didn't mention the speed of the Ethernet interface on the N3200.

LaCie, the somewhat famous external drive manufacturer has got a new designer onboard, Sam Hecht. We can't say that he's familiar to us, but apparently he's into practical design, that's a first. In all fairness, the new drives look quite usable, if a bit bland for something from LaCie.

Rather than using some kind of metallic finish the new Little Disk family as it's know as uses a "oh so in fashion" shiny piano black finish. LaCie's product manager Nolwenn Rozen had the following to say about the new drives

In similar style to Corsair's Survivor series of flash drives, OCZ have announced today some very rugged well-built offerings of their own in the ATV and ATV Turbo series.

These flash drives will cop a real beating as they are both shock and water-proof, the Turbo series has extremely quick memory chips in it which allow for read rates of up to 35MB/sec and write rates of 30MB/sec, of course they are Windows ReadyBoost ready as well.

The external casing features a durable and colorful rubber 'tread' pattern which will keep the internals very safe even when submerged in water.

The ATV and ATV Turbo flash drives come in sizes ranging from 2 to 8GB.

For more information have a read of the official announcement here or head straight over to the product page folks.